War torn
Michael Vestey
political tensions in times of war often I make good drama, and the Saturday Play, Playing for Time — Three Days in May 1940, on Radio Four last week did not disappoint. The disagreement was between Winston Churchill who had been prime minister for a fortnight, and his foreign secretary Lord Halifax, his rival for the job. Churchill wanted to take on Hitler, Halifax preferred to negotiate a peace settlement. As we know, across the Channel more than 350,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were desperately trying to flee the German advance towards Calais.
Robin Glendinning's play was based on minutes of the nine meetings of the fiveman War Cabinet chaired by Churchill (Robert Hardy) in which the prime minister and Halifax (Ronald Pickup) clashed over the issue. Halifax, an appeaser, had been Neville Chamberlain's foreign secretary at Munich and wanted to avoid war even if it meant ceding some Mediterranean territory to Mussolini in return for peace. Chamberlain (Jeremy Child) was also in the War Cabinet, along with the Labour leader Clement Attlee (Bill Wallis) and one of his shadow ministers Arthur Greenwood (Geoffrey Whitehead). Glendinning used a narrator as a linking device: John Martin (David Leonard), who was Churchill's first principal private secretary, though Martin didn't keep a diary of the dramatic events of the time. Nor did he write a book about them.
Glendinning captures the contrasting temperaments of Churchill and Halifax, and makes it easy to see how the two wouldn't really be able to work together for long. Churchill came across as eloquent, passionate, impulsive, irascible, impatient and, above all, right; Halifax, cool, intellectual, calculating, devious and ultimately wrong. Exasperated at not getting his way, Halifax confided in Chamberlain that Churchill was lacking in judgment, sentimental, temperamental and romantic: 'I have come to the conclusion that his process of thought has to operate through speech. How can we get him to think more?' With the Nazis invading Holland, Belgium and France and with the BEF's retreat to Calais and the Dunkirk rescue yet to occur, Churchill observed that if Britain and France had made concessions to Hitler it would he seen as a sign of weakness. Halifax was prepared to risk that if Britain's independence could be preserved, another terrible and futile attempt at appeasement. It was an appalling dilemma, but Churchill won the day, of course, and Halifax went off to become British ambassador to Washington. We're all familiar with Churchill's famous speeches; Hardy has played Churchill before so he knows how to reproduce his speaking style, but I wondered occasionally if he also spoke like that in normal conversation, which the actor has him do. Pickup plays Halifax haughtily and silkily. and Whitehead portrays Greenwood as the bluff northerner which he probably was. The play reminded one of how fortunate the country was to have had Churchill in charge, despite his faults.
This difference in formal and informal speech is also noticeable in other kinds of broadcasting. A listener to the Radio Four complaints programme Feedback (Friday) had criticised what he called the 'breakneck speed' of the delivery of reporters' contributions to From Our Own Correspondent (Thursdays and Saturdays). From memory, when I used to contribute to FOOC, as it's known, I would say that each report lasts somewhere between four and five minutes. Most of the practitioners are in news, and are more used to shorter bulletin reports and current-affairs packages, which tend to be sharp and to the point and therefore more formal. Delivering what is in effect a measured talk requires a different skill and not everyone is good at it.
Listening to last Saturday's FOOC, my impression was that the contributors weren't speaking too quickly. While one or two might have applied a more conversational style. it seemed to me that they spoke at the right pace. Thinking I was not a fast speaker, I was sometimes surprised to hear my own broadcasting voice talking at a gallop. On Feedback the example of the late Alistair Cooke was invoked as the ideal broadcaster of talks. So he was — brilliant, actually — but his talks were more than 14 minutes in length. The earlier broadcasts of Letter from America were delivered with more pace; he honed his style over many years, artfully giving the impression that he wasn't using a script. His pieces from the archives now being played (Fridays, repeated Sundays) end in late June, and on the Fourth of July one of his producers Tony Grant — also editor of FOOC — will present a programme called Letter to Alistair which looks back at their correspondence and what it was like to work with him. Something I'm looking forward to.
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